Still have a long way to go, especially with any post processing work but hoping to get some feedback on the lighting (and whatever else you think would be helpful). Watched a couple of videos and decided I had enough of a clue to get into some trial and error. I have a few more that I’ll post later but this one is pretty representative of the lighting in all. What do you think? Suggestions for next tine? This was with 2 softboxes. Key light camera left at a 45 degree angle, 2nd softbox used for hair light maybe should have been a bit higher?

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Better than I could do.

Thoughts:

Maybe a bit of fill light. Either with a reflector or another flash/strobe.

But this really depends on the look that you are going for.

Hair light

The angle of the hair light depends on what YOU want it to look like.

The traditional hair lights that I have seen light up the top of the head. But for a hobbyist, a horizontal boom supported light is a luxury that I do not have, nor the room to make it work. So I am still working on a practical hair light setup that will work for me.

Black background with a brunette is a problem, to get the hair separated from the background. I would have used a grey, dark grey or mottled background, just to get that hair/background separation.

Having a small assortment of different backgrounds to choose from helps.

I think the default for a single background is a mottled background.

A background light can lighten the background to give you that background/hair separation.

BUT, the serious look on her face does match with the black background.

So I would go with trying to illuminate the hair to give you the hair/background separation.

The pendant is off centered. OK, I'm a little OCD, and not being centered bothers my eye.

Jewelry in general can be a problem, because bright/shiny/brightly colored objects/jewelry will attract/distract the eye from the subjects face. So it can both compliment or detract from the subject.

In this case, if the pendant was centered, it would not have bothered me, but because it is off-centered, it becomes a distraction.

To your questions:

Flash/strobes do not mix with continuous lights. You have to put a CTO filter on the flash/strobes to bring their color temp down to incandescent temp. This is something that I would just as well avoid, so best to use a single type of light source.

IMHO, when you start out, you want to use either continuous light or a strobe with a modeling light. This is so that you can see the light and shadow as you are positioning the light and the subject.

When I say strobe, I mean either a pack/head system (like Speedotron Brownline) or a monolight, which have modeling lights. I do NOT mean a shoe flash or similar.

If you use a shoe flash (strobist style), you have to wait till after the shot to see what the lighting looks like. So learning is much slower than with a continuous light or modeling light. Because, visualizing what the light and shadow will look like, takes time and experience to learn. And unless you are tethered to a computer and monitor, I find the little screen on the back of the camera too small for me to evaluate lighting very well.

For continuous lighting, I would try to look for a lighting source other than a HOT light. Because a HOT is HOT, and uncomfortable to work under for any length of time. CFL or LED are much cooler to work under for long periods of time.

For continuous lighting, get MATCHING bulbs, so the color temp is the same. Don't use a combination of daylight, warm white and cool white, because the color temp of each bulb is different. And at the store, make sure that what is labeled on the box is what is inside. I've seen where people have switched bulbs around.

In a studio situation, I would lock down the white balance to whatever light source you are using. This is so that the camera is not changing the white balance under your feet. If your camera does not have a WB setting for the light you are using, do a custom white balance.

SquarePeg,
I pulled these three shots into Lightroom and hit AUTO, and it reverted them to a more-or-less the straight out of camera look, which really had a different "feel" to them. I was unaware that you had pulled the background way down to black until you mentioned it; the way these had originally been lighted and exposed was in some ways, better than the as-shown images with the backdrop pulled down to black. I think that perhaps these would be good processed with the original-toned, lighter backdrop.

A couple Christmases ago, I shot a bunch of location studio-lit portraits in front of a medium-gray fabric background, and I pulled the whole exposure down by about 3.0 EV, so the backdrop was black, and then in Lightroom, used the Dodge tool set to 0.7 EV Plus-Exposure, and using an adjustment brush, painted back on the light, in four passes of 0.7 EV each....worked great! I got the black backdrop, but was able to make the people look good.

I think the same processing approach would work with that backdrop.

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Thanks for taking the time to look at them in LR. I should have elaborated in my initial posting that I set out to copy a certain dark fashion portrait look that I’d seen done in a Creative Live tutorial. It was a dark haired model in a sleeveless black top against a black background. The actual background they used was gray but they used grids to keep the light from hitting it. I tried to do it without grids by moving away from the background but didn’t get far enough out. Also, didn’t expect the sheet to show up so didn’t bother ironing it!

I’ll have to download the raw files to my laptop and try your suggestions. Again thanks for the detailed response.

One issue that might have made things tough for you was the use of continuous lighting. With continuous lights, the exposure settings are often a rather slowish shutter time, and a moderate to wide aperture value, like say from 1/20 second to maybe 1/40 second at ISO 400 and an f/stop ranging from f/2.8 to perhaps f/4.8 or something in that general range; that means that, quite often, the exposure triangle (speed,aperture,and ISO level) creates a background that registers pretty clearly...revealing the wrinkles in the sheet for example, at an exposure that is correct for the face.

If on Creative Live they were using flash illumination, it would have been pretty easy for them to "drive down" the backdrop value all the way to black, in a way that's much harder to do with continuous lights of low to normal power levels during daylight hours. With flash at say f/8 at 1/200 second at ISO 100, almost anything indoors under the normal room lights gets verrrry dark!

I was shooting at f3.6, ISO 200 and around 1/250 give it take a stop on either side.

The CL video used only continuous light in the studio but they had much larger soft boxes and also a couple of other lights - one she kept calling a barn door and another was an octobox I think. It was a “live” one so can’t rewatch it now but it was excellent.

Ok, tried to take in the excellent advice and feedback from everyone. Again thanks so much to all who responded for taking the time to look and to share your comments and knowledge. I couldn’t reshoot due to time constraints today but I did re-edit another from that session taking your advice and suggestions into account. Would love any additional critique or comments that you care to share.

White balance warmer - check
Bump to exposure and highlights for a glow - check?
Slight bump to contrast - check
Desaturated weird neon color in lips - check
Leave black point alone - check
Leave background light enough to show hair - check (although I don’t care for the way it came out when I tried to hide the wrinklesin the sheet)
Show more detail in shadows of hair - check
Eyes lighter - check
Necklace straightened - check
No weirdly placed or cut off hands - check

@D
I got to go read my books, but I thought broad lighting was lighting the face, head on.
It seems like the subject is pretty much facing the primary light source.
I shoot very little studio portrait, and get confused by some of the lighting terms. So I may be completely wrong.
Now to go look for my lighting books.

@sp
GOOD job.
I like the centered pendant, it is no longer a visual distraction.

BTW, I was taught by a portrait photographer, that we all think the big stuff (clothes, pose, etc), but it is the little stuff that will subtly detract from a good photo. And you have to have the eye to see and catch those small stuff. I wish I paid more attention to how he worked. He had a better eye for that stuff than I ever will.​

I like how the hair separates from the background.

This used to be a bug of mine. In black and white, dark brunette hair would blend into dark green plants. That was hard for us to plan for, as we had a hard time visualizing a color scene in B&W. I was burnt MANY times by this mistake.​

@D
I got to go read my books, but I thought broad lighting was lighting the face, head on.
It seems like the subject is pretty much facing the primary light source.
I shoot very little studio portrait, and get confused by some of the lighting terms. So I may be completely wrong.
Now to go look for my lighting books.

@sp
GOOD job.
I like the centered pendant, it is no longer a visual distraction.

BTW, I was taught by a portrait photographer, that we all think the big stuff (clothes, pose, etc), but it is the little stuff that will subtly detract from a good photo. And you have to have the eye to see and catch those small stuff. I wish I paid more attention to how he worked. He had a better eye for that stuff than I ever will.​

I like how the hair separates from the background.

This used to be a bug of mine. In black and white, dark brunette hair would blend into dark green plants. That was hard for us to plan for, as we had a hard time visualizing a color scene in B&W. I was burnt MANY times by this mistake.​

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Thanks for your comments. Going to have to pay more attention to detail so there'll be less to fix in post.